Hello, My complements: I've been using empire-db for about two months to build a service that provides very dynamic data access to a series of semi-static ROLAP database schemas for use with RIA data visualization. My implementation uses empire-db classes in a way that is entirely runtime configured, as opposed to the typical compile-time usages shown in your examples (but probably not totally dissimilar to your code generator). The largest benefit I receive from empire-db on this particular project is vendor-neutral SQL generation. However, I've used every conceivable java persistence technology over the past dozen years (JDBC, early EJB entity beans, SolarMetric Kodo, Hibernate, Ibatis, JPA, ad infinitum) and I think empire-db strikes the perfect balance of flexibility and ease-of-use for a typical transaction processing application. Great job! I wish empire-db would get a little more exposure with the technology bloggers, because I only found out about this great technology by accidental, yet providential, google search for something very specific.
My question: I'd like to now improve performance by adding caching to reduce the cost of aggregation for mostly-static data. Do you have any recommendations for using empire-db with any of the common open source java caching projects? I'd particularly like to leverage the db itself for secondary cache (when a LRU method purges cache entries from memory). Ideally I'd like to use a true data table as opposed to serialization of cache entries into a BLOB column. Sorry for the long email, but thanks in advance. Greg
